In its push to entrench Google App Engine as a serious Platform as a Service, Google is adding support for SendGrid’s email APIs to the mix. That means developers building applications on GAE can build in the ability to launch automated email actions in response to specified triggers or events, and is the first non-native email available to these developers.

If you use sign up for a web service, change a password, check into a site, etc., those are the types of actions that SendGrid automates. The Boulder, Colo.-based company estimates that 20 percent of such email “transactions” never reach the user’s inbox. Its technology helps take the burden of managing all of those deliveries off the shoulders of the development team and claims to push delivery rates to 95 percent. The news that Sendgridis part of GAE’s parnter program was disclosed in a Google Cloud Platform blog post Wednesday.

As I reported earlier, Sendgrids’ biggest rival is Amazon Simple Email Service (SeS). By using SendGrid, developers can split workloads between their infrastructure provider and their mail service provider — which is important if they are worried about locking in to one backend provider. Obviously, as Google pushes its own cloud platform as a viable alternative to Amazon Web Services, this could be quite helpful.